Tag: web

web

Working the Cloud – Launch Party

No commentMar 26th, 2013 in augmentedreality, makers by epredator

I was pleased to get a chance to head to London last Friday for the launch of Kate Russell’s new book Working the Cloud. Amazingly this is Kate’s first book which given how often she has provided interesting tech news on the TV on shows like BBC Click is pretty amazing. Mind you, I have not written a book yet either 😉
So yes I was at the launch party along with other media people and fellow tweeters, but I wouldn’t write about something unless I thought it had something going for it. This book and its supporting material certainly does.

So what is the book all about ? Well it is a fantastic curated collection of useful tools to help anyone who has not yet fully realised the power of the web in getting things done. Starting a business, communicating with customers, creating interesting content etc. it is all covered.
It is not merely a collection of URL’s as each is explained as to the benefits of a particular tool or web application. Each section also has more than one alternative and is also peppered with tips. This is because Kate is writing about things she has used, is using and in some cases maybe stopped using for a better alternative.
This is really an expression of Maker culture, but for the more apparent mainstream ability to just get on with things. Too often people want to read lots of instructions for each application, making decisions as if there was not way to change afterwards. I think the book points to a spirit of doing. There are a stack of tools out there, they are accessible, often free or very cheap and there is no excuse for not using them.
To prove the point that there is more than one way to uv unwrap a feline polygon model Kate has done more than just publish a book. There is the ongoing companion website http://workingthecloud.biz/ and apps for mobile devices too.
The cover of the book itself is an augmented reality trigger for Aurasma’s app too. Something worth having a look (and listen to) if you see a physical copy of the book in a shop. The intro (without sound on) can raise a few eyebrows someone is looking over your shoulder 😉

Kate also did a virtual book signing. Oddly I missed this as I was in a Choi Kwang Do class at the time. However it was a transmedia gig using Google Hangout

There were some tweets with @andypiper about the other first virtual book launch back in 2006 in Second Life. Which I remember very well 🙂

This is of course a different sort of event 🙂 So we are not going to take Kate’s first away from her 😉 Though the next edition of the book must have some 3d virtual world communication in it. Who knows maybe I can guest write that 🙂
I am looking forward to Kate’s next book which she crowdsourced the funding for on Kickstarter to write some science fiction for the new Elite Game which again proves that she is doing all the things in the book not just writing about them.

A quick study with Unity3d, dropping things.

3 commentsApr 25th, 2009 in branding, education by epredator

I have been looking into Unity3d a little more recently. As a programmer since I was 14 (thats a long while ago) I tend to look at languages and toolkits with a sort of skim pattern approach. I look for tiny pieces of flexibility knowing that if they exist then a lot more can be combined with more effort and time to produce the required results.
Unity3d has this flexibility in so many ways, as well as providing a whole host of useful tools to help create things on a grand scale.
I had already explored being able to get image resources from the web from places like Flickr, once that inbound route is possible then the web can be used for all sorts of triggers to an application. However I wanted to explore the physics and character animation potential.
I am not a graphic designer, nor an expert in high end 3d packages but I do know a little of what I need to do. I started to use the excellent Cheetah3d on the Mac as it is low cost, suites my needs and works well with Unity natively.
Whilst at the airport I built a little person, and also rigged it with bones and joints. The only problem I had was having created the individual prims I could not see how to get them to become one mesh. It turns out you have to use “Import Children” in Cheetah3d. However having done that it leaves copies of the children in the heirarchy, which is helpful but confused me as I thought it was not working. Once that was done though we were all systems go.

Telling Unity3d about the figure was very simple, a drag and drop in fact.
Once in Unity3d it was easy to create a terrain, select some foliage, have it autiomatically populat the terrain with that foliage. I then used the ragdoll wizard to tell Unity3d about the joints and parts on the Cheetah3d figure.

The rest was a few clicks to see what worked.
This example is not “interactive” as such, but just a little example for my own benefit, but I liked the result so I thought I would share it 🙂

****Update I just added little bounce button to throw the things back up in the air again (once they have landed). This is doing a publish of a message to a set of listeners. once again a nice implementation. Of course all the ragdoll physics may make it a little clunky for now real reason, but optimization is another subject:)

You can launch the example here it should do all the plugin checking for you I hope